1. Field of Invention
The present invention pertains to the field of information receiving systems. More particularly, this invention relates to a mechanism for maintaining information variety in an information receiving system.
2. Art Background
Information systems enable a wide variety of information to be transmitted to individual consumers of information. A typical information system includes an information transmitter and one or more information receiving systems each possessed by a consumer of the information. Such an information system may be based on over-the-air transmissions, satellite transmissions, wire-based transmissions including cable, or fiber-optic transmissions, to name a few examples.
The relatively high bandwidth available in such systems usually has the potential of overwhelming the information storage capacity of the information receiving systems possessed by individual consumers of the information. It is therefore desirable to provide such information receiving systems with the capability of storing only selected portions of the transmitted information that is of interest to individual consumers. Moreover, it may be desirable to provide such information receiving systems with the capability of maintaining information variety in terms of the types of information of interest to individual consumers.
A mechanism for maintaining information variety in an information receiving system is disclosed. The information receiving system receives a stream of incoming objects each corresponding to one or more content categories. The information receiving system includes an object store for holding a set of cached objects for access by a consumer of information. The information receiving system includes an object store manager that determines which of the incoming objects are to be added to the object store and which of the cached objects are to be evicted from the object store such that a variety of information according to a set of consumer interests in the content categories is maintained in the object store.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the detailed description that follows.